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The five most interesting mobile loyalty apps

When a good idea comes along in retail and digital there are soon many, many start-ups getting in on the action.

Take loyalty apps for example. Loyalty is a big beast. Many types of company may consider it part of their remit, from digital payment solutions, to social-style check-ins, to group buying sites, or indeed a retailer’s own app.

I’ve previously looked at the state of apps in retail and found that using loyalty schemes is pretty much the major rationale for customers using a retail app.

Whether customers will settle on retailers’ own apps or on a generic loyalty scheme provider (perhaps lumped with payment) remains to be seen.

But of those tens of consolidated loyalty apps, which are the best? Here’s the list of five I think are most interesting. Whether mobile wallets such as PayPal and Google Wallet will buy them up remains to be seen but the space seems set to get richer before it gets poorer.

shopkick

6m people use shopkick, which makes it the most used shopping app. Of course, the term shopping here refers to physically shopping in store.

Shopkick already partners with Macy’s, Target, Best Buy and JC Penney, as well as with payment providers like Visa and MasterCard, and brands such as P&G and L’Oreal. Shopkick has more than 150 partners in total.

Users get points (called kicks) for entering a store and further kicks scanning items and purchasing. Rewards come in the form of gift tokens for the store in question.

The app does a lot more than rewards, too..

What makes it interesting?

The feed

Items you might be interested in nearby appear in your feed. These items can be bookmarked for later and selecting an item with suggest other things you may like.

From the feed you can look at stores nearby, both at their wider catalogue and at what will garner you rewards.

shopBeacon

Location based loyalty taken to the next level with shopBeacon. The system allows favoured items to be flagged to the user when they are in an appropriate area of the shop.

Belly

Belly has over 6,000 merchants, so like shopkick it’s one of the bigger loyalty players out there.

It’s a purer experience than shopkick, concentrating on loyalty and driving new business, though there is the option for merchants to use an email program, too.

It is different however in that it’s run from a store tablet. This could be a potential drawback for some merchants but it also gives the customer some degree of autonomy, not having to rely on interaction with a customer service bod.

Users place their paper loyalty card or app QR card over the tablet camera and this updates the merchants database and qualifies customers for rewards.

What makes it interesting?

The proposition and user experience is clean and clear.

Belly Bites are little freebies sent to your app which you can save and redeem in store. This is a great way of drumming up new business.

Pirq

Pirq used to be in the daily deal business but launched nationwide in the US as a loyalty platform late last year.

Pirq doesn’t require the use of a tablet in-store, like Belly and others do. Instead, users scan a merchant tag in-store, often hung around a customer service bod’s neck.

What makes it interesting?

Facebook integration allows merchants to target different demographics with different deals.

With a background in deals, one can expect Pirq to provide tasty offers, in addition to the punchcard loyalty programmes.

Juengo

Juengo points can still be redeemed for merchandise, like classic loyalty schemes, but the points are won with actions, not through purchasing.

So signing up for a newsletter or scanning a QR code at an event or upon entering a store may earn you points. At the moment, it’s only available in the US and Greece.

What makes it interesting?

While it isn’t something for nothing, the idea of disrupting the loyalty model and offering rewards for doing should appeal to a particular set of customers, arguably those most engaged.

You can also earn ‘Juengos’ by being one of the top scorers on Piggy’s Revenge. If that’s not good, what is?

What makes Juengo different is the Juengo marketplace where one can see the rewards that can be claimed. These appear to be fixed gift card rewards and make the whole experience seem more prize-oriented and gamified than simply small rewards for regular visits. The rewards can be claimed, it seems, no matter where the Juengo points were gained, so the scheme is a little broader than single-store loyalty.

However with only 14 rewards on there at the moment, it may be struggling in a newly competitive market.

FrontFlip

A not dissimilar concept to Juengo, with QR codes scanned and then ‘scratched off’ on your phone to reveal offers. The offers are time sensitive and often deliver free gifts such as a free pastry with your café.

What makes it interesting?

FrontFlip has partnerships with some big hitters in food like McDonald’s and Burger King. The proposition is clearer than Juengo and the adding a time element to the incentive makes it a compelling offer.

The lack of guidelines or general wisdom as to which retailers should actually have a mobile app and which shouldn’t can be confusing.

In this post I’m going to start writing those guidelines myself, if you’ll stick with me.

There is definitely a burgeoning anti-app movement, fuelled in part by the move to adaptive or responsive websites. On top of this, the growth in app downloads is in sharp decline and we seem to be reaching market maturation for apps, in those countries that have highest smartphone adoption.

But what should retailers do? Should some still be entertaining the idea of a new app? There are certainly some great success stories out there.

Some feel that the consumer has no interest in using many different retail apps, whereas others think the goal of consolidation is often unrealistic, with consumers happier using a range of options.

Where should apps lie in a priority list of ecommerce to-dos? Which apps are succeeding and which aren’t? How do customer base, product range, internationalisation and other factors affect the decision whether to build an app?

Well, these are the questions I’ve been attempting to answer. Read on to see what I dug up. If you make it to the end of my investigation, you’ll find my own criteria for apps in retail.